


Luck of the Draw

by PepperCat



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Christmas Party, Christmas Presents, Christmas Shopping, Christmas Tree, Gen, Shawna is the best at video games, Sleepy Cuddles, family photo, junk drawer as memory, last-minute presents, running fingers through hair, stealing evidence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 03:43:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8874436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PepperCat/pseuds/PepperCat
Summary: ...yes, well, you try shopping for a baby Trickster. Axel didn't expect that gift; Hartley didn't expect that reaction. Fluff. (I mean, fluff with mentions of James Jesse, but fluff.)





	

There were some habits Hartley Rathaway couldn't quite bring himself to break, patterns and conventions he'd grown up with before he realized they were being inculcated. While he'd managed to break with some of the more painful and damaging ones, others clung stubbornly and would not be uprooted, no matter how he tried to dissuade himself.

As an end result, this year as every other: Christmas presents were what you _did_.

He'd already sent Thea her present. He _may_ have arranged to have gifts delivered to his parents which would disappear into a black hole of unacknowledgement. The Lewis Hamelin Community Preservation Foundation was sending a holiday (not Christmas) bonus to everyone who worked at the Din, in addition to issuing several grants to local shelters. He'd paid off the Rogues' tabs at Saints and Sinners (except Roy, who didn't drink much, so he was getting two tickets for an art opening and if he could _please_ get around to taking Shawna that would probably be lovely)...

Clearing a bar tab didn't quite seem to cut it for a roommate.

Axel already had his pick of all the bad (and some good) entertainment and garish clothes and repurposed craft supplies and bizarrely flavoured drinks you could _get_ if you had the kind of income that came from occasionally participating in a Rogues heist, and all the explosive components Hartley was willing to put up with having in the house. It made him hell to shop for.

Technically, he knew that it was just _stuff_ , and presents were more stuff. Axel was particular about some of the things he already owned, but Hartley suspected that if he was given a gift and didn't like it, he probably wouldn't be offended; he'd just throw it out.

(On the other hand, he'd voiced the "just _stuff_ " opinion around Lisa, and she'd said something sharp about how some people _appreciated_ having stuff, thank you very much, and not everyone grew up with it all. He'd apologized until she was mollified, and she'd reinstated her Christmas invitation, but he'd come away from it all no less stuck for an idea for a present.)

The bookstore didn't exactly help, but it was a nice place to browse while he was trying to have an idea.

The cooking section didn't have anything (although he made a note to send a copy of _The Food Lab_ to Caitlin).

_Greatest Disasters of the Modern Age_. No. Too impersonal. Also he might take it as a source of inspiration in some way Hartley couldn't quite imagine and didn't think was _likely_ , but...

_How To Be An Adult In Relationships_ made him laugh, but he'd had too many (one was too many) of those subtle self-help nudges that came disguised with wrapping paper to foist one onto someone else even _if_ there was the slightest possibility of Axel taking it seriously.

The title of _My Friend Dahmer_ caught his eye as he was walking past (and made Hartley blink at what comics were doing these days), but it felt like it had too high odds of getting read as a dig at James Jesse. He wandered over to the true crime section. _Twisted: Central's Year Of Terror_ was a quasi-in-depth look at James Jesse before he'd been captured, and if Axel hadn't already read a copy to tatters Hartley would personally eat every book on the shelf in front of him. He picked it up anyway and flipped through it. It was better referenced than he'd expected, and the section in the middle was two dozen glossy pages with high-detail replicas of some of the documents related to the case, mug shots, a couple of the more dramatic crime scene photos--

Hartley closed the book on the picture of the Lockhart drowning, shuddering a little, and put the book back on the shelf. He stepped back and put his hands in his pockets.

Books were fundamentally mass media; even the rarer ones weren't anything special. The only reason Axel wouldn't have something he was interested in would be if he couldn't afford it (no longer an issue) or if he hadn't heard of it (extremely unlikely) or it wasn't available for some reason (in the second decade of the 21st century? as _if_ ). You had to get into lettered editions or something with a personal inscription before they started being unique, and no-one really did anything like that for Jesse. He supposed someone might have done their thesis on the man, but it wasn't as if Axel couldn't have gotten his hands on that, too.

He was _not_ getting Axel James Jesse memorabilia for Christmas. That was just disgusting. Even something as relatively innocuous as one of the fake IDs he'd used would have to have been stolen from the evidence lockup, and Hartley didn't trust anyone else to have done that cleanly--

He paused for a second, calculating, then took the thread and ran with it.

Assuming moderate intelligence on the part of the CCPD, it didn't seem _unreasonable_ that upon finding an accomplice of James Jesse's that had engaged in correspondence with him for over a decade, they'd want to collect everything that might contain information about his plans going forward.

And then they'd want to sift through it as throughly as possible. And then...

Hartley began to smile.

* * *

"Axel?" Hartley said, coming down the hallway to the living room. It was Christmas Eve, and Axel was stretched out on the couch watching something with sorority girls and Christmas decorations. One of them had already been murdered. "Are you coming over to Lisa's?"

"I'm good. You go ahead."

Hartley paused, blinking. "I'll be right back."

Axel glanced disinterestedly up, then paused the movie as a couple of soft bumps came from Hartley's room. Hartley emerged, lugging a rather large box that had been wrapped in Christmas paper. There were cartoon reindeer on it. And snowflakes.

"What the hell."

Hartley set the box down with a bit of a thump. It sounded heavier than Axel would have expected, but most of the time he'd seen Christmas presents that big--over a foot wide and deep, maybe a foot anna half long--they were just cardboard boxes wrapped with paper in a store display.

There was a shiny green bow on top. With yellow springy ribbons all fluffing out around it.

"I planned to give you this when we got back from Lisa's, since it'd've been Christmas by then," Hartley said, "but if you're not coming it seems a little rude to make you wait on my getting back. So I thought I'd bring it out now, and if you're going to be _here_ when it's Christmas, you can open it. You're usually up until midnight, aren't you?" He was starting to look nervous, and Axel stretched across the arm of the couch, propping chin on hand and waiting for him to finish. "I mean, I'm not expecting you to stay home if you don't want to, but I thought I should at least give it to you now-- In any case, you don't need to open it now. It's not even Christmas yet. That'd be weird."

"Yeah," Axel said, giving Hartley the _your fuses are all loose_ look, " _that's_ what'd be weird."

"Anyway!" Hartley dusted off his hands (not that the present had any dust on it to speak of). "I should get going. If you've decide you want to come over later, I'm sure everyone'd be glad to see you." He pulled on his coat and headed out.

"You know I didn't get you anything, right?" Axel yelled after him, and heard Hartley yell something back about that being fine before the door closed. He unpaused the movie and settled back to watch.

He was halfway through _Gremlins_ when he ran out of popcorn and got up to make more. When he came back, one of the rats--a smallish one that wasn't a really dark black, so it might have been the one Piper hit him over--was snuffling at the box, standing on its hind legs with its front paws on one of the corners.

"Hey," Axel said softly. The rat stopped to look at him. "Come on, that's mine."

The rat's whiskers twitched. Axel picked one of the pieces of popcorn out of the bowl, blew on it to cool it down a little, and tossed it along the ground. It bounced past the box, and the rat turned and scuttled after it.

He squatted down next to the box--the _present_ \--and poked at it. It didn't shift; definitely not an empty box, then. He picked it up, discovered it wasn't quite heavy enough to be DVDs and definitely not heavy enough for books, and thought about Piper really probably being harmless for a second before he did the kind of thing you should _never_ do with a mysterious box and shook it.

He heard stuff slithering and bumping against itself, but not very much. Either the box was pretty full or whatever was in it was pretty big and didn't have a lot of room to move around.

Okay then.

There was an envelope tucked under the bow, labelled READ ME FIRST in Piper's dry printing.

> Axel,
> 
> I'm sorry that I couldn't get more. A lot of what was taken into evidence from your apartment was filed with the new charges against Jesse, and that's still high enough priority that I can't actually get those 'misfiled' to be released. However, the rest was set aside as part of an audit of the foster care system. I was able to have it reclassified as 'personal property no longer of interest', which is a lot easier to get back.
> 
> I didn't look at any of it, but I thought you might appreciate the chance to go through it yourself and decide what to keep or throw away.
> 
> Merry Christmas,
> 
> Hartley

Axel thinks the shape of the box looks familiar now, with the new context; not a file box like you find in a lawyer's office, but an evidence collection box, something they use to hold personal effects in if the effects are bulky enough. He pulls off the bow and wrapping paper and then the lid, stirs one hand through the contents, picking out and tossing away stuff he doesn't care about or doesn't remember.

It looks like they just dumped in everything that was in or on his dresser that wasn't clothes, and then picked out the letters from Jesse and most of the books and all the diagrams. There isn't a lot left, and some of it is junk--he had more takeout menus than he remembers--but some of it sparks memories.

The first thing he stops at is his notebook from history class, back in high school. He didn't give a shit about history. But Denny was in the class too, and used to sit in back; he'd draw in the notebook or write stuff and slide it over, and sometimes he'd get a smile. He flips through the pages, slightly yellowed paper and a whole lot of ballpoint.

He puts it aside and keeps digging.

Spare key to his old apartment; he kept one after the first time he lost his keys, because it wasn't that hard to pick the lock but it was a pain to go find the super and get a new copy and they charged twenty bucks for a replacement. His copy of the lease, long since expired. Student ID card from one year at CCU, classes were shit but the labs were _so_ useful. That little plastic alien he'd stolen from Drew, which he didn't care about anymore but could maybe hollow out and use for something, and the watch he got from... ah, hell, couldn't remember the guy's name. A handful of teeth. Denny's bracelet that he'd said he'd fix. A handful of bottlecaps from Four Aces hard root beer; he'd always liked the design.

His serial killer card deck is there, which he wonders if it's worth trying to bring to poker night sometime and he decides not, but he opens the pack up and shuffles it anyway. He can still float a card. The deck's got an extra ace of diamonds; Mary Bell, a card he made for Denny, and they used that when they played cards instead of the one with Dahmer. Mostly.

He tosses the box of cards down and picks up the pictures.

Some are from the time he swiped a camera and it had most of a roll of film left in it so he used up the rest of the roll; he remembers most of them, but a couple don't spark anything, have all the emotional kick of dollar-store props. There's a couple of school pictures. Half the strip of photos from that photo booth at the mall; Denny'd kept the other half. A few postcards that he hopes are only there because someone fucked up; they don't actually have anything to do with Jesse but they _could_ have, and he likes the idea that someone fucked up better than he likes the idea that they read them.

...they probably read them.

The picture of him and his mom isn't the last thing in the box, or even the last photo. It's just the one where he stops looking.

It's a little faded, and it's got the dots of coffee on it from when it nearly got ruined one day and he got it off the desk in time.

It's in good shape, for twenty years old.

He isn't so interested in looking at himself. His mom's another story. He never _forgot_ her face, it's just-- it just got shouted down by a couple of things and he'd lost all the pictures when he went to Iron Heights and there hadn't ever been a way to find her and he'd just basically written off _seeing_ her again...

They're both smiling in the picture. They're both _blond_ ; he hasn't been blond since he was a teenager. Axel hooks a strand of his own hair down in front of his eyes and looks from it to the picture, and he's about to laugh at the change but it can't quite get through the funny hiccupping thing he's got going right now.

Things were _really simple_ back then.

Stupid evidence bag, making the picture look all blurry.

* * *

Lisa heard the banging on her door while Mick and Mark were roaring cheerily at each other over what else to put in the eggnog. Shawna was showing Roy a video game, and Hartley was sitting on the arm of the couch, following along and hardly looking at all like he was about to start talking game theory. She let Len keep clearing the table while she went to the door.

Someone was kicking it instead of knocking properly, but politely; a case of not being able to knock rather than trying to break it down. Lisa looked through the spyhole and saw Axel grinning like a Trickster, snow melting in his hair and on his coat.

She opened the door. "I thought you weren't co--"

"Is Piper here?" He was flushed from the cold, grinning, and both his hands were full of shopping bags; Lisa heard bottles clinking as he hurried in, looking around. "Did--" He dropped all the bags to the carpet as he spotted Hartley next to the couch. " _Piper!_ "

Shawna and Hartley looked up at the same time. Shawna dropped her controller and grabbed Roy's wrist and both of them reappeared on the other side of the living room in a swirl of smoke, next to the heavily bedecked tree.

Hartley would not ever _admit_ to yelping, but there was a definite high-pitched noise as Axel tackled him clear over the arm of the couch and they both ended up on its cushions.

" _Piper Piper Piper Piper--_ "

"Lisa--" Mick, from the kitchen-- "you need me to break that up?"

"We're good!"

"...ribs..." Hartley said, prodding at Axel's shoulder with his free hand. Axel had managed to get both arms around him and was squeezing him like six-year-old with a teddy bear, and it wasn't malicious and wasn't even unpleasant but he was going to run short of breath soon. And it felt rather undignified. Axel squirmed around and hauled him up to sitting on the couch, still not letting go.

"I opened it early," Axel said. "I think I opened it early-- yeah, I must have, it's not Christmas yet? A couple of places are still open, I didn't know what to get, I thought _everyone likes booze_ and I grabbed a couple of necklaces for Lisa and Boo--I mean, I _paid_ for them, I was in a hurry and I didn't want to deal with cops or anything tonight--and I don't know what to get you but I'll figure something out, okay?"

"Alright," Hartley said, a little bemused, but Axel's mood was infectious and this was a better reaction than he'd hoped for. "I take it you liked it?"

Axel laughed and rested his head on Hartley's shoulder, arms looped loosely around his waist. "Yeah," he said. "I'll get you something. Promise."

"You two need a room?" Lisa said.

Axel shook his head. "Piper got me a Christmas present," he said. "It was a good one. D'you like yours? I figured diamonds..." He shrugged.

"I'm sure it's lovely," Lisa said, picking up the bags and setting them on the table. "Axel, honey, you're dripping snow all over your friend and my very nice couch. Ditch the coat and boots."

"'kay." Axel let go of Hartley and began wiggling out of his coat. "I'm sorry I was late. It's really nice here-- Sorry about your game," he added to Shawna with a nod towards the TV and the controllers. "Hey, is there any food left? Something smells great. Can I help in the kitchen? Do you guys want drinks?"

* * *

Axel settled into the corner of the couch, watching Shawna and Hartley play _Black Ops_. He had one arm lightly across Hartley's shoulder, and was talking past him to Shawna, and if it was distracting her any it sure as hell wasn't slowing her down.

Mark headed out early. It was past midnight by the time Roy started making noises about leaving, and Shawna caught it and said "I'll walk out with you, just give me a minute," and promptly went from mostly beating Hartley to utterly annihilating him. She bounced to her feet as Hartley was blinking down at the controller in his hands. He looked like he was about to frown for a moment, then shrugged and set the controller down.

"It's the eggnog," he explained to Shawna, who raised her eyebrows and made a very light mmm-hmm noise. He leaned forward, and Axel took the chance to squirm around and get one of his legs behind Hartley, stretched out along the back of the couch. "No, seriously. Any drink Lisa gives you never _tastes_ different, it just has triple the alcohol..."

"Uh-huh."

"She has a secret meta power to do that." Hartley snickered, then leaned his head back as Axel began tugging fingers gently through his hair. "She was in a bar the night of the explosion. I _bet_."

"You're drunk," Axel said.

"I am feeling no pain. It's not quite drunk, but it's mellower than being buzzed."

"Drunk."

"Happy."

"It's nice when he's a happy drunk," Axel said to Shawna, and she smiled, pulling on her coat.

"It was nice of you to come out, Axel."

"Awh, Boo, you say the sweetest things."

Hartley said something that was either very soft French or just a generally content noise. "Just don't stop doing that?"

"What, this?" Axel finger-combed Hartley's hair again, and Hartley let out a sound between a snore and a purr and put his feet up on the couch, stretched out and cuddled against Axel's chest. Axel checked to make sure Hartley didn't have his shoes on, and grinned up at Lisa as she came back from seeing Shawna and Roy out. " _Totally_ a happy drunk."

"Hush up and cuddle," Hartley said with a sleepy peremptoriness.

Axel laughed. "He's gonna pass out," he told Lisa.

"You two...?" Lisa raised an eyebrow and Axel shook his head.

"Nah. Just." He shrugged and ran his hand down Hartley's back. "Uhm... Can he crash for a bit? He'll be up in an hour or two and I'll get him out of here."

"That's fine. Just keep in mind that that is my _very favourite_ couch, Axel. I will _not_ be happy if you give me a reason to replace it."

Axel laughed again. "I don't ever want you to be unhappy with me, golden girl," he said. "You got a blanket or anything?"

Lisa went to the kitchen with Mick and Len; Axel could hear them talking but couldn't make out words. The blanket was warm and the ceiling light was out, but it wasn't really dark. The coloured lights on the tree were still twinkling; cherry-ice pink, candy blue, mint green, a yellow nearly warm enough to be orange, white like a tiny daydreaming star. Outside the balcony door, the snow was fluffy and the clouds were low and thick and bouncing back the light from the city, so the air had a peculiar nighttime bronze-rose hue. Axel thought he might actually thank Sparky for that.

After a while--when the snow had crept up enough that he could see it sticking to the glass balcony door, above the edge of the bottom frame--Hartley stirred. Axel grinned and brushed the hair out of his eyes.

"We fell asleep?" Hartley said.

"Yeah, we're at Lisa's. Old guard's in the kitchen." Axel paused. "You wanna go home?"

Hartley sighed. "Probably should."

Axel grinned. "Wanna lie here and watch the Christmas tree for a bit?"

"...yeah."

There was a moment's quiet. Axel didn't think he was going to doze off again; it was warm, and Hartley was just heavy enough to be comfortable, but he wasn't _tired_. Just... relaxed.

"Piper?"

"Mm-hm?"

"I really do wanna get you something, okay? For Christmas."

"That's fine."

The quiet came back. Axel looked down at Hartley, who was looking at the tree; he could see its lights shining in Hartley's glasses. "I'm not good at presents," he said. "I'm good at surprises. Not presents."

"Oh." Hartley shifted enough to rest his hand on Axel's shoulder. "I'm not always very good at them either. I hoped you'd like yours. But I didn't know what it'd be. I got lucky."

Axel snickered. "Don't worry," he said. "Anyone asks, I promise to tell them you were nice by accident."

"Right. Are you going to tell me what I got you that you're so happy with?"

"Maybe later."

Hartley sniffed. "In any case. I just meant... please don't worry too much."

"Mhm." Axel laced his fingers together in the small of Hartley's back. "You don't get upset when my present's not as awesome as yours, I won't worry. Deal?"

"Agreed."

And the lights twinkled, and the snow fell.

**Author's Note:**

> Lines which I clipped from this:
> 
> * * *
> 
> "You want to put _25-year-old El Dorado_ in the eggnog?"  
>  "Don't you?"  
> "...hell yes."
> 
> * * *
> 
> The movie Axel's watching before _Gremlins_ is _Black Christmas_ (the _original_ , TYVM); the game that Shawna trounces Hartley at is called _Black Ops_ because that's the video game Hardison was playing in the _Leverage_ episode "The Experimental Job".
> 
> In the original _Flash_ TV show, Megan Lockhart was a private investigator. At one point, James Jesse kidnapped her and tried to drown the Flash upside-down in a water tank (which he escaped); since in the current show there wasn't a Flash for James Jesse to deal with twenty years ago, I imagine things happened a little differently.
> 
> It's choppier than I'd have liked, but it's been a rough few days and I need to work for the next seven days straight, so I'm posting this now.


End file.
